Sugartown (3 page)

My host let the screen door bang shut and set the latch. My mental picture of the former detective sergeant hadn’t been far off. He was a big man, my height, with more shoulder, although what I have is not to be sneered at. His hair was thick, smoothed back from his broad face as if by meaty palms like his, and of that neutral color that can’t make up its mind whether to go gray or stay sandy. His heavy jaw was cleanshaven and he had a long upper lip that made his nose look small and a small nose that made his upper lip look long. His eyes were a flat gray under low brows, cop’s eyes. He was a very good-looking fifty, but he was fifty. He was wearing a charcoal-gray security guard’s uniform with shield-shaped patches piped in red on the short sleeves and one of those Velcro belts that don’t need buckles.

“I thought you were retired,” I said.

“I am. You think I’d make this a career? My pension’s the only thing that hasn’t gone up since I left the big blue machine. I was just coming in from the eight to four at Shaw College when you called.” He moved a big hand in the direction of the open door and I went that way.

It was a large kitchen like they don’t build them now, with a scuffed but clean linoleum floor and a long white enamel sink with a window over it and a gas stove and refrigerator and a table with a sheet-metal top and three vinyl-covered chairs that didn’t match drawn up to it. A short wainscoted hallway jogged to the left into an unlighted living room. On the plaster above the wainscoting hung a large crucifix carved from a single block of maple. A Velcro gunbelt lay in a heap on the table with a nickel-plated Colt Python in the holster.

I tilted my head toward the crucifix. “Mayk doesn’t sound Polish.”

One side of his mouth went up. “It was Maykowski, but not to some civil servant on Ellis Island when my old man came through. My boy went back to it, but he designs machine parts for a living and doesn’t have to sign his name as often as I did.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, shaking it to find out how much was inside. “This is all I got if you’re thirsty,” he said. “I been on the wagon since New Year’s.”

“Milk’s fine. Tied one on, huh?”

“Man, I missed most of last year.” He got two glasses out of a cupboard next to the sink and put them on the table and filled them, shook the carton again, tilted the remaining contents down his throat, and tossed the empty container into a green plastic wastebasket.

We sat down across from each other at the table with the gunbelt between us and sipped our milk. “How much you jacking the old lady up for?” he asked, whipping away his moustache with a thick forefinger.

“Two and a half yards per,” I said. “But I’m not jacking her up. That’s the standard rate.”

“I figured some cheap shamus would latch on to her sooner or later. I’m just surprised it took this long.”

“She came to me.”

“You didn’t waste a lot of time arguing her out of it, though.”

“Turning down paying work takes practice. Look, Mr. Mayk, I’m just poking around. If the trail’s too cold I’ll give her back what’s left of the retainer and advise her to run something in the personals or forget it. Just don’t ask me to do my job for free.”

“I tried private work after I left the department,” he said. “I didn’t like the company I was keeping.”

Silence stretched thin and tight the enormous length of that kitchen table.

“How was the smelt running?” I tried.

He raised his brows an eighth of an inch — a feat, considering those brows. “What, that bath I took didn’t get rid of the smell?”

“I saw your gear in the Bronco. They aren’t wearing waders to chase butterflies this year.”

“You ever been?”

I grinned. “Once.”

He laughed then, a short harsh barking noise, and the air in the kitchen got warmer. “Freeze your ass off all night in Sturgeon River water up to your bellybutton and scoop out little fish till your arms get too heavy to scoop out any more. One man just can’t take that much hilarity all at once.”

I laughed too. We drank our milk. After a little I said, “The Evancek shoot.”

“Didn’t she tell you about it?”

“Just what you told her. Cops don’t talk to grandmothers the way they talk to people.”

He smoothed back his hair with one of his big hands and left it on the back of his neck. When he did that he looked like a big rough farmer.

“It was just about this time on what had to be the hottest son-of-a-bitching day of the year,” he said. “Lieutenant Jezewski got the squeal at the station and sent Bill Mischiewicz and me out there. We came to this house where a uniform about twenty-two was heaving his guts out on the sidewalk in front and Bill said, ‘I think this is it.’ Well, you had to laugh. Anyway, we park behind the black-and-white and go in right past the uniform, which if we were the whole Red Army he wouldn’t of noticed us, and, Christ, how can I make you see it? You saw the blood first, on the walls, the floor, Christ, even on the ceiling, orange-red and splattered all over like a pressure cooker full of red cabbage blew up. For a second I thought it was something like that. Blood always looks too bright to be blood till it dries. The bodies looked like bodies, though, not like dress dummies like I bet I heard a million people say. The first two were on the floor in the living room, one a lot smaller than the other, and the only way we could tell the bigger one was a woman was she was wearing a dress. We thought at first the other was a boy because it had on red corduroys and a striped shirt. Their faces — well, they didn’t have any.

“Another uniform came out of the bedroom and said we’d find the last one in the kitchen and he had the boy, Michael, in the bedroom. Bill sent him back in to keep an eye on the boy and we went into the kitchen. The third stiff was sitting on the floor with his back propped against the back door and his face all over the wall behind him. He had this twelve-gauge automatic shotgun between his legs and Bill said it looked like he was jerking off. Well —”

“I know,” I said. “You had to laugh.”

He shook his big head. “Not that time. It almost sent me out front to heave up with the blue suit. I told Bill to shut it. I mean, he was a sergeant and I was just a third-grader then, but the only feelings he ever had were in his holster and in his crotch. No one was all that broke up when some seventeen-year-old punk put a thirty-two slug through Bill’s head running out of Svoboda’s liquor store later.

“Well, we talked to the boy, but he was in shock and not saying much, and a couple of days later when he’d been collected by his aunt and uncle and we got back to him he said he’d found the bodies when he got home from school. That jibed with what most of the neighbors told us. By then we’d ID’d the stiffs — Jesus, his little sister was just fixing to start school in September — and what we found on the scene and what we knew then about this guy Joseph Evancek and the fight the neighbors overheard just before the shots were fired went with the murder-suicide scenario and we locked it up tight.”

“Most of the neighbors?”

“What?”

“You said that what Michael said about coming home from school and finding the bodies agreed with what most of the neighbors said. What did the others say?”

He removed the hand from the back of his neck and waved it in front of his face impatiently. “There’s always a nutcase looking to get attention by claiming he saw something nobody else did. An old guy across the street said he looked out his window just as the kid came home
before
the first shot, and then the housewife from next door piped up and said she saw the same thing. You learn to spot them.”

“Check out their stories?”

“Departmental fucking procedure. Housewife said she saw the boy coming up the driveway when she went out back to feed the cat. Only there was a six-foot hedge between the houses and when Bill and I went back there neither of us could see the driveway from where she said she was standing, and she was a foot shorter than either of us. The old guy had a clear view but he was a nutcase like I said. There’s always some confusion in these things as to who heard and saw what first, but there was enough agreement between the other witnesses to discount his story.”

“Would you remember his name?”

“It was almost twenty years ago, what do you think? Anyway, the old guy’s dead by now, or if he isn’t he’s moved. Neighborhood’s all tore up.”

I drank the last of my milk. It left a slick coating on the roof of my mouth, but in my business you drink whatever they offer you. You never turn it down. “Anything else that didn’t fit with the other evidence?”

“I never worked on a case where there wasn’t.” He frowned, pulling his upper lip still longer. “The blood test, maybe.”

“What test?”

“At the autopsy they ran Evancek’s blood and the alcohol level tested lower than you’d expect in a case like that. Oh, he was drunk enough to pull off the road, but he had some size, about five-ten and a hundred and eighty, and if a guy with his reputation as a boozer didn’t get violent before, it was sort of strange he’d pick then and on so little booze. But it was just one of those things that passes through your head when you’re wrapping one up. He did it, all right. We ran every angle and it was the only one that came close to fitting.”

I looked at my notebook scrawl. “How much of this did you tell Joseph’s mother?”

“She got the Disney version, like you said. That about the blood test didn’t bother her any more than it did me when it first went down. She’s had a long time to get used to what her son did.”

“I guess you don’t have any ideas about where the boy wound up.”

“If I did she wouldn’t of had to hire you.”

I passed that one. “I’d like to take a look at the old Evancek place. Could I buy your time as tour guide?”

“Would you charge it to the old lady?”

“Probably.”

“Then it’s on me.” He rose. “I got nothing to do till the wife gets home anyway. Let me get out of this monkey suit and we’ll take the Bronco.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Don’t bother. It’s for Mrs. Evancek. We Poles stick together.”

He went down the hall into the living room and opened a door somewhere on the other side. I got up and leaned a shoulder against the hallway wall and lit a cigarette. “Why’d you quit the department?” I called out.

“I had my twenty in.” His voice was muffled, as if through fabric.

“You look like you could have stuck it out till mandatory.”

“I could of. I didn’t get along with the new skipper and I figured the hell with it.”

“Who’s the skipper down there now?”

“Same guy. Steve Grabowska.”

“What’s he like?”

“What’s Captain Grabowska like?” He came out tugging an old blue sweatshirt down over the belt of a pair of faded jeans. They nearly matched and he might as well have stuck with the uniform. He would have that look no matter what he wore. “You know the prowl-car cop I told you about, that was throwing up in front of the Evancek place?”

“Yeah.”

He went on looking at me. I said, “You’re kidding.”

“His stomach was a lot stronger when it came to kissing asses.” Mayk pulled the Colt Python out of the holster on the table and inspected the cylinder. Then he scooped a couple of rubber bands off the refrigerator door handle where a dozen of them hung like tired brass rings, snapped them around the smooth wooden butt to keep it from sliding, and stuck the gun inside his belt in front, pulling the sweatshirt down over it. “You carrying?”

I shook my head. “I hardly ever need it to talk to an ex-cop.”

“Stick close, then.” He opened the front door.

“How come?”

“Maybe you’ll see when we get there. I’m hoping not.”

I followed him out through the utility room and stood on the stoop while he drew the front door shut and locked up. I hate it when they talk like that.

“F
UCKING COSSACKS.”

We were driving through the blasted neighborhoods of old Poletown. The sun was gone and the black squares and angles of houses with rubble all around resembled the ruins of a bombed-out village, with hardly a lighted window to a block. The skeletal boom of a crane with a wrecking ball lolling from the end hung against the maroon sky like the head and neck of a brontosaurus with its tongue out. Mayk had been forced to shout to make himself heard over the wound-up whine of the Bronco’s little six-cylinder engine.

“Who?” I asked.

“General Motors and the City of Detroit, to name just two. I grew up here, but I’d need a metal detector to find my way around now. We need another Cadillac plant like the world needs another moon.”

“It’ll create jobs, the mayor says.”

“The mayor doesn’t care who’s working. He’s got a job. And the paper’s full of them. But the scroats around here won’t step out of the unemployment line for less than fifteen an hour. That’s the fairy story of our time, finding jobs for people. What you do is you find people for jobs.”

He had it timed so that he banged the shifting cane into a new gear every time he said
jobs
. We bumped over curbs and corners, cut down alleys going the wrong way, jounced and chattered through cleared lots paved with stones and broken bricks. The four-by-four’s frame shrieked and rattled.

Don’t ever get into a private car driven by a cop if you can help it.

At length we swung around the end of an amber-lighted city barricade and ground to a halt on Newton with gasoline whumping back and forth in the tank. I took my feet out of the floorboards. The street marked the south end of Hamtramck with Detroit pressing in all around like a swollen river parting grudgingly for a rock; on the Hamtramck side a row of houses stood intact, facing a moonscape on the Detroit side with boards and shaggy timbers bristling out of bare stone foundations and big flat sections of shingled roof sprawled on top. It looked like tornado footage on the Six O’Clock News. Three houses stood alone on the corner, two of them dark. Mayk pointed to the one with a light on in a ground-floor window.

“That’s where the old guy lived, the one said he saw the kid get in before the fracas. Surprised the electricity’s still on. That whole block should have been evacuated by now.”